War with China is inevitable. We must decouple immediately and maintain no ties whatsoever. Economic cooperation with China hurts US businesses and funds their military.
Original source so I can show my wife?
Antifa literally started doing police brutality against black graffiti artists on day 2.
Double bag it and throw it in the bins?
It's been a billion years since I studied all this stuff (it was huge books full of information decades ago), but my recollection is that stability is more due to stuff like double stranded vs single stranded profile, RNA vs DNA. Animals cells have their own DNA repair enzymes and the like, viruses don't, but they can use the cell's machinery (which works to maintain double stranded DNA). And across viruses,there are many many approaches to how they package their genome, what they do with it when they enter the cell, etc. I think mutation rate would be totally different for every virus.
You'd only be able to tell something is lab modified vs natural grown if it had some sort of obvious signs of being transgenic, like it was a combination of pieces from two unrelated viruses. Playing around with animal viruses and getting human cells infected its impossible to tell the difference between that happening to a guy standing in a cave full of bats vs a cell culture that you're intentionally exposing to bat virus samples you collected from a cage down the hall.
The most likely way to figure out where the virus came from is to basically look at the humans involved. IE, how did the Chinese respond to the virus outbreak when they found out about it and what sort of things did they communicate internally about the work going on at the lab and what changes should be made in response.
At this point it seems obvious that
- the lab was studying the shit out of bat viruses (see late 2019 job postings at WIV, years of published papers, etc)
- they were not observing proper safety protocols (see obama era state department complaints about this)
- it escaped from the lab sometime late last year. (cases at the market weren't the start of the outbreak).
If the Chinese were trying to intentionally deploy a bioweapon, my guess is that they would have played this out very differently and probably tried not to infect themselves first. Instead I bet this was a chernobyl style fuckup that they took maximum advantage of to screw over everyone.
This whole "lets splice the genome and make a super virus" shit is not how it's actually done.
First off, we don't know how to write genomes from scratch. This isn't like programming in C where you have a language that uses a compiler to produce well defined result. It's extremely extremely difficult to take a sequence of DNA and predict protein folding beforehand. This is why stuff like xray crystallography exists.
Secondly, you can modify viruses the exact same way nature does by providing them with cells to multiply on and then just letting them reproduce until you get what you want. How do you make a bat virus into a human virus? Expose the bat virus to human cells until it starts making use of the cells. The soviets were playing with super-smallpox like 50 years ago. Biological weapon research is cheap and easy to do. To do safely? That's extra. The whole wuhan conronavirus thing is a great example of why the US and Russia have largely given up on making super disease weapons- when it gets out, it inevitably infects your guys too.
I've been out of the biology/genetics game for like 20 years so a lot of things have gotten way more advanced and faster than when I was doing it, but the basic principles aren't any different. It's just generally easier to take what nature provides and cultivate it than making your own from scratch.
BTW, most of the deadly viruses out there are species hoppers- they normally cause some minor infection in some animal but when humans get infected it does something horrible because it's never infected humans before. Maybe a protein that is useful in making mice cough better instead causes seizures or melting flesh in humans.The virus doesn't know, it's figuring this stuff out by trial and error.
Eventually the virus either burns itself out killing all the hosts before it infects more or it learns to be less deadly and becomes a new disease- maybe it learns to give people the shits or a bad cold instead of melting their organs.
This is completely wrong and not how genetics works.
Mutations occur in all places of the genome of the virus randomly. This happens very frequently because it's a single stranded RNA virus that reproduces extremely quickly. There's only one copy of its genome per virus and it's hard to correct errors. The virus makes millions of copies of itself constantly so it doesn't care if a few of its babies come out retarded.
Those mutations can affect any part of the virus. The internal workings, the receptors, the virus sheath, anything. Most of these mutations will be harmful and will impede the functioning of the virus. Some of these mutations will be useful and will make the virus bettter in some way. Some will allow the virus to infect a different host than the one it is currently infecting. This happens ALL THE TIME so long as the virus is churning out more copies of itself. A mutation in a bat virus to make it infect humans is useless to the virus unless bat is in contact with a human (for example, in a lab setting where clumsy idiots are studying infected bats).
The virus can't revert to becoming a bat virus because it has no memory of the previous state of its genome. What is happening now is what happens to ALL species jumping viruses. They adapt to their new hosts and become less deadly because being less deadly makes you able to spread better. Since the virus mutates very quickly, this won't take years. This coronavirus will soon join all the other coronoaviruses that infect humans in the category of "common cold."
My public school experience was in a major (and diverse) northeast city like 40-50 years ago. Is the following familiar to anyone else here?
My experience from day one was being told that racism and prejudice were wrong by my parents, by the tv, by school, etc. Like you couldn't turn on the TV without watching a star trek episode about how good tolerance and understanding were or hearing history about the evils of prejudice, racism, anti-semitism, etc. Or watching all in the family or the jeffersons as they provided caricatures of racist attitudes and how they were bad. This was 24/7. And I was totally OK with this. I thought it was great that everyone would treat everyone else fairly and people would just get ahead on the merits of their work.
This was decades before the matrix, so the idea of the red pill didn't exist back then, but the thing that left a sour taste in my mouth early on was the fact that learning about how not to be racist taught me about what racism was... and I very quickly realized that all the black people I knew (at school for example) were racist as fuck (many openly hating white people and so on). This racism was treated as being completely normal and justified because other white people's ancestors had owned other black people's ancestors a long time ago. Everything about it seemed transparently like bullshit.
I also noticed that white people would routinely be accused of racism when it was obviously not the case, usually for saying obviously true things. And this was on top of all the well known problems coming out of the black community, that were endlessly excused as being somehow caused by white racism... even though I could never seem to find an example of it in my day to day life. Again, this seemed transparently like bullshit. I don't think anyone was fooled by it.
If I could be immersed in liberal bullshit and the less ridiculous anti-racism of the 70s, 80s and 90s and easily see through it, I don't see how the over the top stupidity of the current age could be fooling anyone.